Jack Goldsmith

President Trump on Sunday sought to douse speculation that he may fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III amid an intensifying campaign by Trump allies to attack the wide-ranging Russia investigation as improper and politically motivated. Returning to the White House from Camp David, Trump was asked Sunday whether he intended to fire Mueller. “No, I’m not,” he told journalists, insisting that there was “no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia...“If Rosenstein refused, Trump could fire him and keep firing everyone who replaced him until he found someone who would fire Mueller,” said Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and co-founder of the Lawfare blog.

Arpaio’s pardon unleashed a surge of criticism from lawyers, who argued the move undermined the independence of the judiciary. Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law professor and former head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in the President George W. Bush administration, called Trump’s decision an “irresponsible (but lawful) exercise of the presidential pardon power.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith. I wrote Monday morning about costs within the Justice Department when its leaders stay silent in the face of the President’s caustic attacks on the department’s independence and integrity. I mentioned in particular the silence of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray...Since I wrote these words, Wray and Rosenstein spoke in ways that are widely seen as a response to the President and a defense of the Justice Department and FBI workforces.

An article by Jack Goldsmith...This is all depressing enough. But another sharp cost of Trump’s caustic tweets has been largely neglected: The slow destruction of the morale of federal government employees, especially executive branch employees. Just about everyone I knew when I worked in the Justice Department had an idealistic sense of mission—about the importance of law enforcement to the country’s welfare, about the integrity of the department’s actions, and about commitment to the rule of law.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Adrian Vermeule. Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

President Trump did not need to send a memo or telephone his attorney general to make his desires known. He broadcast them for all the world to see on Twitter. The instruction was clear: The Justice Department should investigate his defeated opponent from last year’s campaign. However they were delivered, Mr. Trump’s demands have ricocheted through the halls of the Justice Department, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions has now ordered career prosecutors to evaluate various accusations against Hillary Clinton and report back on whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate her...“I have no idea what will happen but this letter is entirely consistent with the A.G. later saying, ‘we followed normal process to look in to it and found nothing,’” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a former top Justice Department official under Mr. Bush. “The letter does not tip off or hint one way or another what the A.G.’s decision will be.”

The Harvard Law Review launched a new online blog Tuesday aimed at providing more accessible, timely content alongside their usual long-form fare...“We’ve been publishing long-form, in-depth analysis in our print volume for over a century,” said Kathleen S. Shelton [`18], the Law Review's Blog Chair...Harvard Law professor Jack L. Goldsmith and legal journalist Benjamin Wittes wrote in a Tuesday post that the new medium will “foster better debates.” “Blogs are not, as they are often dismissed to be, shallow,” Goldsmith and Wittes wrote. “Of course they can be, just as an 80-page article can be. But to write well in this format, one must be expert enough to articulate the heart of an argument quickly and persuasively. That is not easy.”

Consider what is, for the moment, an entirely hypothetical question: What might Defense Secretary Jim Mattis do if he received an order from President Trump to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea in retaliation, say, for a hydrogen bomb test that had gone awry?Certainly, Mattis could try to talk the president out of the attack, if he thought the action was unwise...“The president’s view, and whatever orders stem from that view, carry the day,” wrote Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University professor and a widely respected authority on national security law, in a recent post on the Lawfare blog. (Harvard law student Sarah Grant [`19] co-wrote the post.)

Last November, some political commentators predicted that Donald Trump’s unconventional candidacy might give way to a much more conventional presidency. Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues that perhaps the opposite is true – that eight months into his term, Donald Trump is fundamentally changing the office of the president.

Almost nothing is publicly known about the American ISIS fighter who is now in the custody of the U.S. military, but one fact has already made the case extraordinary: The Trump Administration has declared him an enemy combatant, according to a military spokesman...The designation of the American ISIS fighter as an enemy combatant would become more consequential if the Trump administration seeks to detain him indefinitely under that status, legal experts say. If that happens, "then it's a big deal," said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Bush administration lawyer.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

In announcing the Trump administration's phase-out of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called DACA "an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch" under former President Barack Obama and argued that President Trump was pushed to review the program by "imminent litigation" from 10 state attorneys general...As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith points out, the 2014 OLC opinion declaring DACA "a permissible exercise" of executive "discretion to enforce the immigration laws" is still up on the OLC website, "implying that it's still valid for the executive branch." If the office has written a new opinion on DACA, it hasn't posted it to the website yet. "Did Sessions consult OLC on this? If so, did OLC revise its views and/or withdraw the 2014 opinion?" Goldsmith asked on Twitter, adding, "If Sessions didn't consult OLC, what's the status of 2014 opinion? Will it be withdrawn?"

If President Trump ordered a senior government official to support the firing of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, how should that person respond?...Presidential orders cannot ordinarily be ignored or dismissed. Our system gives the commander in chief extraordinary power. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor and former assistant attorney general, explained in an email: “A subordinate in the executive branch has a presumptive duty to carry out the command of the president. If one doesn’t want to for any reason, one can resign — or refuse the order and face a strong likelihood of being fired.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. We don’t yet know why Mark Corallo, the spokesman for President Trump’s personal legal team, resigned yesterday. Politico, citing anonymous…

...Over the past few decades, political scientists have concentrated their study of norms on developing democracies, where they came to see such informal structures as tricky things — the lack of clear-cut consequences for violating them made them permeable. But in a 2012 paper, the political scientists Julia Azari and Jennifer Smith argued for a return to studying norms in American politics, an idea that turns out to have been prescient: In 2017, our attention has been snapped back to norms by a president who seems completely unconstrained by them..."I detest much of the president’s norm-defying behavior," Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, wrote on the blog Lawfare. "But I worry at least as much about norms related to our governance that have been breached and diminished as a result of, or in response to, Trumpism."

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Many are debating the significance of today’s Per Curiam Supreme Court opinion that granted the government’s petitions for certiorari and its stay applications in part. Did the Court signal that it would uphold most elements of the decisions below, as some argued? Did it signal the opposite—that it would reverse most elements of the appellate court rulings? Will the case be moot by the fall? I think it is very hard to predict how the Court will decide the case next Term, except perhaps to say that if it reaches the merits, the claims of foreign nationals who lack a relevant relationship with a person or entity in the United States aren’t looking so good.

For someone on the job barely a month, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was already facing plenty of incoming fire from her critics. Her big problem now: Her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, could soon be among them...“Brand is in a very tricky spot,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes wrote in a joint blog post on Friday. Both men know Brand and “admire her a lot.” But they said they were worried by her lack of experience as a prosecutor “or even a background in criminal law.” They said she might now be confronting the “tough task of insulating the investigation from the erratic and inappropriate behavior of President Trump.”

A personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that the president is considering whether to get rid of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the former FBI director who has been assigned by the Department of Justice to pursue and oversee the Russia investigation. Legal experts however say this would be incredibly difficult, and if Trump succeeded it could trigger a crisis in American institutions...Legal experts agree it would be a mistake and have laid out why it could throw the nation into crisis if it succeeded. “This seems like such a bad idea—for the nation, and for the President—that I have a hard time believing it is a live possibility,” wrote Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense, in a blog post Monday.

President Trump awakened this morning (if he slept at all last night) and decided it would be a good idea to seize on the London terror carnage to launch a fresh Twitter attack on the courts and on his own Justice Department. In so doing, he may have given opponents of his immigration ban more ammunition against it in court...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in various legal posts in George W. Bush’s administration, told me in an email this morning that Trump’s new tweets are “significant in at least two ways.”